Once Upon a Witch’s Death – Episode 1

Content Considerations: Terminal illness, death/grieving

What’s it about? Witch Apprentice Meg Raspberry was just told by her mentor and adoptive mother that she has only a year to live before a curse takes her out! Her only chance at survival? Collect a thousand tears from people who are truly happy. Will she succeed?

Okay, I admit it. Once Upon a Witch’s Death made me almost shed a tiny tear. I can’t help it when I see a little child cry–it’s too much!

The best way I could describe Once Upon a Witch’s Death is sweet, sentimental, and inoffensive. The characters are all gambatte!, everybody is kind, and even when there is death and mourning the main conflict of the episode arises from a toddler trying to be too considerate of other people’s feelings. 

It’s so sweet, in fact, it makes it impossible to believe the show has any stakes whatsoever. There is no way a show that’s this sweet could kill its protagonist. You can tell from the entire tone of when the adoptive mother introduces the conflict that it is not to be taken particularly seriously. The protagonist laughs and jokes her way through the entire situation, at first in denial, and even when she processes its reality, whatever feelings of anxiety or worry she has are not communicated through any element of storyboarding, soundtrack, or composition. She says “I feel miserable,” but the world remains bright, the music cheerful, everybody around her reminding her how much they love her and how popular she is. 

The central conflict of the episode revolves around a family in mourning over the death of the mother. On one hand, the show uses a lot of small details to establish certain traits the mother has, becoming a pseudo-detective story as Meg tries to tease out what flower it was in the Far East that the mother wanted so badly for the child to get to see. (Honestly–I find her kind of annoying during this sequence, particularly when her response to a father talking about his grief is to give a “well that’s awkward!” type face.) However, she ends up feeling like more of a plot device than a character–we learn very little about her other than she was a housewife who liked flowers and collected herbs. This makes the grief the family is going through hit much less hard.

The child herself who is mourning the mother risks falling into being too pwecious, and narrowly dodges it by revealing at the end how much she was hiding her hurt by pretending to be the innocent, uncomprehending child who doesn’t know what death is, to comfort her father. This landed for me–seeing a child who doesn’t know how to be loved in her true feelings try to play a role–however, it doesn’t exactly feel developmentally appropriate for that age. Children are much messier than that! This didn’t prevent the ending from making me shed a tear, but it’s not exactly peak storytelling here.

Overall, this could be a nice comfort watch if you like sweet, sentimental stories you know will always end well. My mess-loving ass will probably not remain in the seat for it.